Food, Recipes, Garden and Photography

Tag: Vegetarian

A very good Green Onion Chutney. It has a zingy flavour with a mixture of sweet and sour from the lime and sugar, and fresh herbs from the coriander and mint, the chillies add the final kick. Best eaten fresh. I’d say within an hour or two. But may keep for a few hours longer in the fridge. It is great as part of a small set of raitas, pickles, salads, and chutneys when serving Indian nibbles like pakora.

It’s particularly easy to make. I have a small food processor and find it essential for this. Just put everything in the processor and blitz, I use the Pulse feature. If you have the patience then you could chop it all finely by hand, but for me, life’s too short.

This chutney works with almost any curry, pakora, poppadoms etc. It’s particularly nice with Kheema.

Ingredients

Large handful mint leaves

Large handful coriander leaves

2 fresh green chillies roughly chopped (I leave the seeds in)

1 small (about 75g) onion roughly chopped

1½ tsp sugar

¼ tsp ground cumin

2 tsp lime juice

¼ tsp salt

Method

Tip it all into a food processor and blitz on pulse; you might need to scrape it off the sides a couple of times. Doesn’t want to be too smooth in my opinion. Some texture is required otherwise you will just make a paste.

This Pakora is lovely, and can easily be made in advance and reheated. Made by deep frying. If you are reheating then this can be done by heating in a hot oven, or refrying to crisp and heat up. The Pakora freeze well too, and like all of these things, I think this helps the flavour.

Ingredients

250g chickpea (besan) flour

50g self-raising flour

1½ tsp salt

1 tsp turmeric

1 tsp ground coriander

1 tsp ground cumin

½-1 tsp Kashmiri chilli powder (vary this according to how many bits of green chilli you will use and how hot you like it)

250-300ml cold water

300g potatoes, coarsely grated. You need to squeeze the water out of the grated potatoes.

300g onions either all grated or very very finely chopped, or you can leave some in longer pieces to make the finished pakora a bit more gnarly if you like. But you really need to grate at least some of the onion to get the flavour.

100g fresh spinach, coarsely chopped

1 or more fresh green chilli, with or without the seeds depending on preference.

Method

Mix the flours, salt and spices in a large bowl.

Add water till you get the thickness of double cream

Add everything else and mix it in. (If the mixture is too wet add a bit more chickpea flour and mix it in)

Using a deep fat fryer at about 180C fry the pakora in batches. My fryer is small so I find I can only do 2-3 at a time. It takes 3-4 minutes per cook and I usually try and flip them over halfway.

You can veg this up in lots of different ways. I’ve made with courgette rather than potato and it’s been lovely. You can substitute some of the potatoes with whole frozen peas.

Serve with some salad and dips/sauces/yoghurts/raita/chutney/pickles etc. Let’s be honest, what’s wrong with a bit of tomato ketchup on its own or even mixed with some greek yoghurt. Green onion chutney is a winner too.